IFFF revisited

IFFF revisited

In this archive programme we dip into the Festival’s now 30-year-old-plus back catalogue and present ground-breaking films by women directors that are still highly topical today. By our curators combing through the archive, different themes and aspects possibly overlooked in the past can be spotlighted, thus connecting links in the history of emancipation and film where none were previously present (or visible). The long-term aim of this programme is to strengthen queer-feminist historical representation and memory culture.

In 2022, the film and media scientist Borjana Gaković joined the team and is presenting a program with two films by Ula Stöckl: Rede nur niemand vom Schicksal (Just don’t talk about fate) and Das alte Lied (The Old Song).

Ula Stöckl was the first female film director from western Germany to go to Dresden immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall to shoot a somewhat different version of the national anthem, the Lied der Deutschen. The complexity or even impossibility of reunification is at the core of her ‘on-the-ground report’ – deep, insurmountable rifts, in people’s private lives as well as in the political sphere.

The doyen of New German Cinema has had a key influence on feminist film history since the 1960s. She has the knack of putting documentary elements centre stage while incorporating a fictional dimension, in order to make a stand against the unbearable conditions and circumstances as they really are.

 

The signature of the curators of this programme comes through in the films they select. In 2020, Berlin scholar Kat Gorska curated a selection of experimental films from the 70s and 80s. The 2021 programme features a group of students from Ruhr University in Bochum presenting the subject of Club culture.

Curators:

DE
1991
experimenteller Kurzfilm
10’
dt. OmeU

»Everything on earth is imperfect is the Germans’ old refrain« – actress Grischa Huber quotes Hölderlin from the former ›death […]

The Old Song

Ula Stöckl

DE
1992
Feature Film
82’
dt. OmeU

It is Christmas in Dresden, 1990. The steady camera movements reveal the dark brown walls whose apparent fragility seems to […]